On all fronts CATIE promotes the concept of 'climate smart territories’, and this leads to a model that aims to reinvent the way in which the individual relates to his environment. This is what we call systemic approaches and they are part of the work that we have been doing for 40 years, creating innovative models to generate knowledge and develop tools that facilitate their implementation.

For this model we have considered the power of collective action in each territory where each actor, guided by a common vision, contributes to the conservation, management or restoration of this space.

Climate smart territories are the answer to these challenges. They are the product of decades of CATIE’s work, dozens of projects and hundreds of partners that have reached millions of people in hundreds of thousands of square kilometers in Latin America, incorporating successful experiences of other regions of the world.

Increasing the capacity for adaptation of the territory and its inhabitants, production systems and ecosystems, in the face of the growing pressures caused by global changes.

Why do we say that our model is novel? The answer lies in its three key areas of action: its actors, its scale and its approach.

Its actors: This involves all the people who have an influence on the way in which the environmental, social and productive resources of the territory are managed.

Its scale:The territory is the smallest unit for achieving a real and collective impact that goes beyond the environmental, social or productive. It’s like watching the full movie to make the impacts of joint action more effective.

Its approach::The climate is a determinant, fundamental and critical variable for any sustainable development approach. Climate smart territories incorporate climate into the mitigation of imminent global changes, present and future. For the first time, a multitude of variables are combined in order to address the complex problems of human beings and their environment in an effective and integral manner.